The ETC Press is proud to announce the release of A Purple Architecture: Design in the Age of the Physical-Virtual Continuum, edited by James F. Kerestes, Ebrahim Poustinchi, & Vahid Vahdat.
A Purple Architecture is an edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness, as a quality independent from the assumed virtual/physical, material/immaterial, mediated/immediate dualities. Purpleness thus serves as a theoretical framework to investigate the impacts of technological mediation in developing possible spatial scenarios through storytelling.
The centuries-old topic of how to represent reality, and subsequently how to supplant it, was catapulted into Western popular culture through the 1999 film The Matrix, in which the protagonist is faced with a choice between taking a blue pill or the red pill. One keeps him in simulation, and the other confronts him with reality. A Purple Architecture questions the assumption that these two parallel conditions are mutually exclusive. In the context of this volume, the purple pill is not reduced to an in-between hybrid liminal condition. Purpleness is also as ontologically autonomous (and gradient) as any other color on the electromagnetic spectrum of light.
A Purple Architecture offers a selection of provocative, interdisciplinary design projects and discusses each through several critical essays that thematically contextualize the projects. It presents the work by employing a “choose-your-own-adventure” format. Readers are thus equipped with the agency to curate their reading experience by choosing the order in which to explore the projects and essays. Serendipitous connections are discovered and assisted by the integration of Augmented Reality components. Therefore, by augmenting it at the intersection of the physical and virtual, the reader’s experience becomes a portal to introduce purpleness through a cyber‐physical experience.
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